Est. 2010 – "Dishonest, diversionary and pompous…"

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The UK Gives In and Gives Up

It is a matter of perspective. If you have been taught all your life that America is the worst country on earth by those who have believed the same their entire lives, you are going to define anyone who shows any pride in America as evil and a fascist.

The UK is sick again with Chamberlain’s Disease. Peace in our time means appeasement – “maybe they will kill us last” – and self-loathing – “OMG, we are the worst country in the world, who are we to say the Sudetenland doesn’t belong to Hitler?”

Why should we worry about the UK?

Because like Brit pop music and TV shows, what happens there eventually washes up on the shores of America.

Jonathan Last of the Weekly Standard writes:

At the beginning of the 20th century, the British Empire was an unopposed hyperpower (much as the United States has been since 1989). As historian Colin Cross observes: “In terms of influence it was the only world power.” The British people and their leaders accepted this fact. In the early 1930s, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin pronounced that “the British Empire stands firm, as a great force for good.” Historian William Manchester argues that “most of the crown’s subjects, abroad as well as at home, felt comfortable with imperialism.”

But after the conclusion of the first World War, Britain’s imperial psyche began to fracture. “After the survivors of the Western front came home,” Manchester writes, “Britons wanted nothing more to do with war; most of them hoped never again to lay their eyes on an Englishman in uniform, and they were losing their taste for Empire.” Winston Churchill despaired of this change. “The shadow of victory is disillusion,” he noted. “The reaction from extreme effort is prostration. The aftermath even of successful war is long and bitter.”

A deep desire to avoid conflict, even at the price of letting the Empire dissolve, permeated British society. In 1931, the House of Commons passed the Statute of Westminster, the first step toward independence for Britain’s dominions. In 1932, a poll found that 10.4 million Britons supported England’s unilateral disarmament, while only 870,000 opposed it. Historian Alistair Horne observes that, after World War I, it took just about 10 years for the “urge for national grandeur” to be replaced by “a deep longing simply to be left in peace.”

Why did it all crumble? Several interrelated reasons – among them the grisly fact that England had lost virtually an entire generation of future leaders in the trenches of Europe. But another important cause was the waning of confidence on the part of liberal British elites, whose pacifism evolved into anti-patriotism.

In 1933, the Oxford Union – a debating society and one of the strongholds of liberal elite opinion – held a debate on the resolution “this House will in no circumstances fight for king and country.” The resolution passed. Margot Asquith, one of England’s leading liberal lights, wrote that same year, quite sincerely: “There is only one way of preserving peace in the world, and getting rid of your enemy, and that is to come to some sort of agreement with him. . . . The greatest enemy of mankind today is hate.”